Such was the state of cosmetic surgery for centuries: strange medical devices and uncomfortable treatments. Radical change in elective surgery wouldn’t come until World War I, which saw chemical bombs and skin-burning mustard gases. New weaponry meant new, more violent and difficult-to-treat wounds. The best at this kind of conflict-inspired plastic surgery, and perhaps the most important name in cosmetic surgery was Sir Harold Gilles, a New Zealand-born WWI physician. He was the absolute pioneer of several techniques involving the skin graft and the pedicle, a closed tube of attached skin that is grown for use elsewhere on the body. Read More...
Even génocidaires have standards, apparently. In the 1930s, Adolf Hitler had publication of this photo (and others like it) banned because he considered it “beneath one’s dignity.”
How did these photos surface, then? In 1945, an Allied soldier named Alf Robinson found a tattered, coverless book in a bomb-blasted house in Germany, and added it to his collection of Nazi relics, according to reports. It turns out that the book was more or less a propagandistic Nazi party “fanzine” called Deutschland Erwache (Germany Awaken), and written by Baldur von Schirach in the 1930s. Read More...
After the British discovered the Nazis' meth-like secret weapon in a downed German plane, they decided to develop their own performance-enhancement program.A number of reports have come to light in recent years about the widespread use of methamphetamines and similar substances in Nazi Germany. Adolf Hitler himself frequently had his personal physician Theodor Morell inject him with Eukodal, a cocktail of oxycodone and speed. Wehrmacht troops on the front, meanwhile, relied on a crystal meth-like drug known as Pervitin to stay alert and awake. Read More...
